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The government appears to have prevailed in its bid to ban over 300 Fixed Dose Combinations (FDCs). But in the most inefficient way possible. It has let the problem get out of hand, then fought the industry in more than one court, constituted two different committees to weigh in on the issue and culminated with a relatively small, but valuable, number of drugs from its 2016 list still awaiting further study. In the interim, it has drawn global criticism for its lax attitude towards safety. Read my quick take published yesterday on money control here. The ban comes a decade after the first attempts made to tackle the issue by the then Drugs Controller General of India, and 6 years after a Parliamentary Standing Committee strongly criticised the office of the drugs regulator for jeopardising patient safety.